leadership

It’s so fun to be in Wyoming this week speaking. What a beautiful place. I can’t wait to share more next week about my journey. In the meantime, since I missed our Leadership Tuesday because of travel, I offer this Thursday installment from June 2013 where I share about the importance of an optimistic leader:

If you worry about everything that can go wrong, you would never do anything. You’ve got to be able to focus on the things that really matter and not lose too much sleep on the rest. Julia Gillard, Deputy Prime Minister Australia

Today, we look at another pivotal leadership strategy: Optimism. How you frame your story, and the energy you exude, enables you to walk more fully into your leadership potential.

Optimism has several perks – a positive attitude not only motivates you but also motivates those who follow you as well as provides you with an ability to bounce back after a set-back.

First, what can you do when faced with set-backs? Start simply. Accept that failure from time to time is going to happen. In fact, failure is often the catalyst to more fully develop your leadership skill sets like coping, rebounding, learning from mistakes, and pressing on. Optimism helps you separate the person, you, from the end result. This is where you can become more resilient.

I heard a former CEO say, “I’m suspicious of somebody who’s never failed, because you don’t know how they’re going to react when they do. Everyone is born to fail. Everyone is going to break down. What matters is not how often you have been on the canvas, but whether you get up, how you get up, and what you learn from it.”

An article I read, Mandating Women at the Leadership Table: Why the Time is Now, spoke to this optimism-fueled resilience: “Women leaders show a higher degree of resilience and assertiveness than their male counterparts. This coupled with their flexibility and interpersonal connection helps them shake off negativity and setbacks, learn what they need to from the experience, and use the setbacks to fuel their drive to succeed and overcome challenges.”

Next, is the important ability to cultivate a baseline of optimism in order to effectively lead and encourage others. You can have a transforming effect on your team by encouraging others that they have the ability to achieve levels of performance beyond those they thought possible. Leaders can paint an optimistic and attainable view of the future for their followers. With a well-communicated, optimistic vision, you can move people from “how things are done around here” to “how things could be done better.” Personally, strong leaders learn to rise above petty thoughts and self-defeating inner dialogue. Leaders that have control of these strategies and skills are more likely to remain cool and in control in a crisis, not let negative influences bring them down, and not find themselves spinning in self-defeating cycles that can cripple the best of leaders.

How Remarkable Women Lead, emphasizes how important it is to practice optimism. Psychologists believe that you can learn optimism, particularly if you learn where pessimism comes from so that you can stop the downward spiral. “Every woman leader we met was an optimist, and it really doesn’t matter who was born one and who developed the skill. With a little bit of practice, it will be your skill, too, and not just one to deploy at work.” While a happy disposition can be largely hereditary, you can gravitate toward the top of your own bandwidth of natural tendency. More importantly, if you can find things that you liked as a child, things that make you passionate, or recent activities that gave you tremendous fulfillment, then you can begin filling your life with things that are more inclined to provide you with an optimistic and energetic disposition.

To Take Away:Whether you are naturally an Eeyore or a Tigger, you can train yourself to positively frame your life messages. Optimism does not translate to delusional for those of you natural pessimists looking at this section quizzically. Nor does it mean idealism, as some skeptics suggest (though a measure of idealism may help you lead). It means you do not allow failures and setbacks to derail your trajectory. After allowing yourself to feel the sting of not reaching the achievement you set your sights on, move on. Find out what lessons you learned from the experience and explore the next opportunity. Optimism also means you get back to doing things that bring you joy. Find how to incorporate those things that brought you joy earlier in your life into your life today. True joy and fulfillment are attainable, and they are also contagious and will allow you to build a base from which you can lead.

Take time out this next week and listen to yourself interact with those around you. How do you speak about things? Do you see the negativity from a overcome challenges.”

However, I have a searing memory from when I traveled to Paris and wandered into a little bakery and purchased a simple loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, and a bottle of cheap wine. I took my little lunch on the train to Versailles and picnicked in the gardens.

Ahh.

One remarkable lunch.

Every now and again, I wander into a neighborhood chain French restaurant. The bakery shelves glowing and gleaming. Everything looks delicious. It looks like I’m back in France.

French Bakery

Strip Mall Bakery

I apparently suffer from selective amnesia because I know it only LOOKS good. The second I bite into the beautiful bread or pastry, I immediately recognize I am nowhere near Paris. I am in a strip mall in Houston.

Have you ever served under a strip mall, faux-French bread leader?

I have.

And if I’m honest, I’ve BEEN a strip mall, faux-French bread leader.

Those leaders wear the right clothes or say the right things or use the correct terminology, but it’s not who they are. They don their faux exteriors every morning like their pinstripe suit and do their best to look like other leaders they think lead well.

If you’re struggling with this like I have, then let me wave the warning flag: people always find out when you are not authentic. Even the most impressive showman will eventually be found out. Toto pulls back the curtain on the Great Wizard of Oz only to reveal the show – smoke and lights.

You may not feel like your natural personality or your background or your pedigree lends itself to leadership. You are wrong.

You are uniquely equipped to lead a team as only you can. Trying to lead it like someone else is uniquely qualified to do will end badly.

The authors of True North said it better and researched it more, but they offered the same truth:

During the past fifty years, leadership scholars have conducted more than one thousand characteristics, or personality traits of great leaders. None of these studies has produced a clear profile of the ideal leader.
Thank goodness. If scholars had produced a cookie-cutter leadership style, people would forever be trying to emulate it. That alone would make them into personas, and others would see through them immediately.The reality is that no one can be authentic by trying to be like someone else.

Let me encourage you today to sit down with a pen and paper. Write down your best attribute. Your greatest strength. Don’t overthink it. No one is sitting there with you. Write down what comes to you first.

What do you love? What do you do well? When do you receive compliments?

If you aren’t showcasing the characteristics you write down, then start today. Incorporate them into your every day. Trust what you do well.

You want to be the French bread at Versailles. The bite that is perfect unadorned. People will come back for more once they have a taste of the true you. (And don’t let anyone, including yourself, tell you any different.)

Over the next four weeks I will be in Washington, D.C.; Cody, Wyoming and Billings, Montana; Raleigh, North Carolina; Minneapolis, Minnesota; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Austin, Texas three times. With all that travel, for work and for speaking engagements, I will have more limited time to write because the time I’m home I want to make sure I am completely present with my husband and kids.

So a few of my posts will be some of my greatest hits. On Leadership Tuesdays, I’ll look back at some of the original posts but will have some new entries from the new materials I’m preparing as I speak. Since I’m going to be talking a lot about bravery, here’s a post from this time last year about that exact topic – so go be brave you strong leader!

I’ve not ceased being fearful. I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back, turn back, you’ll die if you go too far.
Erica Jong

Sometimes, when aspiring leaders hear “take risks,” they translate that to “don’t be scared.”

As Shona Brown, a Senior Vice President of Google, put it, it’s that point where you’re about to jump off a ski slope that you know you can ski, “and your stomach is going woo!”

Or as blogger Lisa-Jo Baker so succinctly puts it, “Scared is the new brave.”

You move forward even though you are still scared. You bravely take the step that needs to be taken even when your knees are knocking.

Change making is what leaders do. If it were easy, everyone would lead. If it were easy, the world would be a peaceful, vibrant, encouraging place. Change is hard. Change means you won’t always win the popularity contest. Change means things might get harder before they get better or easier or stronger.

Yet as Diane Yu told me when I interviewed her for my first book, “We cannot blindly enter into leadership roles without a practical perspective of what that leadership comes with, yet the burden is one we must bear in order to effect change and make a positive difference in the world around us.” (Learning to Lead)

Sooo… I’m writing another book.

Ack. I just wrote that down.

I am scared.

Because I’m doing this one without the safety net. But this is the book I want to write. This is the book that I feel inspired to pen with each new book I read or each new speaker I hear or each new story I am told.

What if it’s a disaster? What if everything I’m coming up with has already been said? What if this and that and the other? You know how those voices in your head work. And they stop you from doing what you are called to do and uniquely capable of achieving. You are marvelously unique. No one else can accomplish what you can in the way that you can accomplish it.

What would you do if you could do anything?

What would you set your sights on if you felt you could climb that mountain of fear that is blocking your view?

Where would you travel, what job would you take, which position would you run for, what decision would you execute, who would you call, what platform would you build?

Do. That. Now.

Don’t do it foolishly. Lightheartedly. Without analysis and perspective and counsel. Of course. Be savvy.

But do not let fear stop you.

Go ahead despite the pounding in your heart. In fact, go ahead because of it. (===> Click to Tweet) That’s when we live and grow and learn and develop.

Mommy, LOOK, she happily exclaimed, pointing to the butterflies in vibrant colors darting overhead. We were cautioned not to chase the butterflies or run on the trail, but often a butterfly would nearly light on her extended arm.

It had already been a long weekend even though it was 10 am on Saturday. Extended work hours during the week bled into the weekend and calls started early that morning. Another deadline loomed demanding Saturday afternoon attention, and the butterfly center was a brief, but deeply therapeutic, break from the pressure.

She hopped down the stone staircase urging me to rush after her. We cycled between staring down at the plants and waterfall and craning our neck to catch the butterflies soaring against a backdrop of sunlight crashing through the atrium windows far overhead.

I followed meekly, a servant to the force of her excitement and wonder, caught up in the warm dewy air and children exclaiming under oversized emerald leaves.

I did not direct our path. I did not lead the way. I did not suggest a timeline or itinerary. She tired of the spectacular capsule well before I would, and we wandered on to the other adventures in the adjacent museum, driven singlehandedly by her curiosity and energy.

Leaders need to be led.

Feeders need to be fed.

Healers need to be healed.

Protectors need to be protected.

An ever-increasing number of women are leading on so many fronts, they have no respite. They lead successfully at work. They come home and lead their children. They lead in churches or community organizations where they spend their free time. They even have to direct someone making their coffee.

Even the most successful leaders have to find time to be led. Those at the top of their game still need mentors and wisdom and time off stage. Leadership is a life cycle and part of it is stepping back to learn or be still. There is no weakness in asking questions. There is no punishment for letting someone else take the reins. There is no condemnation for allowing yourself a turn to follow. You may find the rest that will fuel your next challenge.

Have you ever been around a toddler? It seems like every question only births five more. And WHY do they ask why? They are curious? They want to know the reason for everything. But the questions can go on forever. They stop yielding any useful information and ultimately test the patience of the adult on the other end until they admit defeat and respond with, “I don’t know,” or “Because I said so,” because everything doesn’t have an easy answer.

Aspiring leaders can be like toddlers sometimes.

They find themselves mired in a vicious information seeking cycle until it hits the point of diminishing returns.

Try this next time: ASK WHY NOT?

Why should I launch a new vision for my team to try to inspire them in this shaky economy? That dooms the answer. It approaches the issue like a problem that has no easy solution. Ask instead, Why not?

When you say WHY NOT, it’s like a switch flips in your head and you charge: “Let’s do it!”

Why wouldn’t we do more or try harder or take a fresh approach or be different?

Primary Sidebar

Welcome

Come on in. I have a reservation just for you. I know life is busy. I would love for us to step out for a relaxing lunch but schedules don't always allow. So let's pop open that salad or sandwich sitting in front of our computers, and we'll have lunch right here. A few minutes is all we need to connect to community.